When many of ARC/AIP's first releases failed to earn a profit, Arkoff quizzed film exhibitors who told him of the value of the teenage market as adults were watching television.[3][4] AIP stopped making Westerns with Arkoff explaining: "To compete with television westerns you have to have color, big stars and $2,000,000".[5]:126

AIP was the first company to use focus groups,[6] polling American teenagers about what they would like to see and using their responses to determine titles, stars, and story content. AIP would question their exhibitors (who often provided 20% of AIP's financing[5]:35) what they thought of the success of a title, then would have a writer create a script for it.[5]:156 A sequence of tasks in a typical production involved creating a great title, getting an artist such as Albert Kallis who supervised all AIP artwork from 1955–73[7] to create a dynamic, eye-catching poster, then raising the cash, and finally writing and casting the film.

Samuel Z. Arkoff related his tried-and-true "ARKOFF formula" for producing a successful low-budget movie years later, during a 1980s talk show appearance. His ideals for a movie included:

Action (exciting, entertaining drama)

Revolution (novel or controversial themes and ideas)

Killing (a modicum of violence)

Oratory (notable dialogue and speeches)

Fantasy (acted-out fantasies common to the audience)

Fornication (sex appeal, for young adults)

Later the AIP publicity department devised a strategy called "The Peter Pan Syndrome":

a) a younger child will watch anything an older child will watch; b) an older child will not watch anything a younger child will watch; c) a girl will watch anything a boy will watch d) a boy will not watch anything a girl will watch; therefore:
to catch your greatest audience you zero in on the 19-year old male.[8]

AIP also capitalized on the popularity of war films with releases such as 1958's Tank Battalion, starring Edward G. Robinson, Jr., backstopped by a bevy of female nurses and barmaids in case the combat scenes failed to interest moviegoers. Made as usual on a very tight budget, the costs of casting meant that the producer could only afford the rental of a single tank for the so-called 'Tank Battalion', and the action scenes were written with this limitation in mind, focusing primarily on the tank's crew and their love interests.

Based in rented office space at the Chaplin Studios, during the early 1960s AIP concentrated on horror films inspired by the Poe cycle. In 1962 Arkoff said AIP were in a position similar to Columbia Pictures just before they made Submarine and Dirigible:

Before that they were on poverty row. Our better position will enable us to obtain more important writers, perhaps more important producers as well. We're a privately owned company at the moment but perhaps within two or three years we will become a public company.[9]

In the United Kingdom, AIP struck up a film making partnership with Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy's Anglo-Amalgamated.

On a trip to Italy, Arkoff met Fulvio Lucisano, an Italian screenwriter and producer who eventually headed Italian International Film,[12] which co-produced 25 films in Italy for AIP.[13] The "International" in American International Pictures presumably lived up to its name. Due to importing completed productions from other foreign countries being cheaper and more simpilistic than producing their own in-house studio films in America, AIP had released many giallo, sword and sandal (or "peplum)", Eurospy and Macaroni Combatwar films featuring many American stars and Italian stars such as the comedy team of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia. However, AIP released no spaghetti westerns, perhaps recalling their failure of Westerns in the 1950s. Many of these films were edited, rewritten with different (dubbed English) dialogue, usually by Arkoff's nephew Ted Rusoff, and sometimes rescored by Les Baxter.

The studio also released edited and English-dubbed versions of several Eastern Bloc science fiction films, that had the dialogue rewritten for the American market and in some cases had additional scenes filmed with American and British actors. These include the Soviet film Planeta Bur (Planet of Storms) which was released by AIP in two different English-dubbed versions, as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women and the highly regarded 1963 Czech science fiction film Ikarie XB-1, which was retitled Voyage to the End of the Universe.

The original idea, usually credited[who?] to Corman and Lou Rusoff, was to take Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher", which had both a high name-recognition value and the merit of being in the public domain, and thus royalty-free, and expand it into a feature film. Corman convinced the studio to give him a larger budget than the typical AIP film so he could film the movie in widescreen and color, and use it to create lavish sets as well.[15] The success of House of Usher led AIP to finance further films based on Poe's stories. The sets and special effects were often reused in subsequent movies (for example, the burning roof of the Usher mansion reappears in most of the other films as stock footage) making the series quite cost-effective. All the films in the series were directed by Roger Corman, and they all starred Price except The Premature Burial, which featured Ray Milland in the lead. It was originally produced for another studio, but AIP acquired the rights to it.[16]

As the series progressed, Corman made attempts to change the formula. Later films added more humor to the stories, especially The Raven, which takes Poe's poem as an inspiration and develops it into an all-out farce starring Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre; Karloff had starred in a 1935 film with the same title. Corman also adapted H. P. Lovecraft's short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in an attempt to get away from Poe, but AIP changed the title to that of an obscure Poe poem, The Haunted Palace, and marketed it as yet another movie in the series. The penultimate film in the series, The Masque of the Red Death, was filmed in England with an unusually long schedule for Corman and AIP. The film, inspired by Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, looks much more opulent than the rest of the series.[editorializing] Many critics[who?] agree that this film is the best in the "Poe Cycle."

Although Corman and Lou Rusoff are generally credited with coming up with the idea for the Poe series, in an interview on the Anchor Bay DVD of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, Mark Damon claims that he first suggested the idea to Corman. Damon also says that Corman let him direct The Pit and the Pendulum uncredited. Corman's commentary for Pit mentions nothing of this and all existing production stills of the film show Corman directing.

Occasionally, Corman's 1963 film The Terror (produced immediately after The Raven) is recognized as being part of the Corman-Poe cycle, although the film's story and title are not based on any literary work.

In 1964, AIP became one of the last film studios to start its own television production company, American International Productions Television (a.k.a. American International Television or AIP-TV).[17] AIP-TV at first released many of their 1950s films to American television stations, then filmed unsuccessful television pilots for Beach Party and Sergeant Deadhead. The company then made several colour horror/science fiction television movies by Larry Buchanan that were remakes of black-and-white AIP films, and sold packages of many dubbed European, Japanese, and Mexican films produced by K. Gordon Murray and foreign-made live-action and animated TV series (including Prince Planet). The best known animated series AIP-TV distributed was Sinbad Jr. and his Magic Belt.

In order to allay the fears of cinema owners who feared current releases would soon end up being shown on television, AIP issued a statement retroactive to 1963 that the company would not release any of their films to television until five years after cinema release unless the film had not made back its original negative costs.[18] AIP-TV also filmed specials of promotion of AIP films such as The Wild Weird World of Dr. Goldfoot (1965, ABC) and An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe (1972, syndication), both with Vincent Price.

In 1978, AIP-TV distributed the pop music series Twiggy's Jukebox. For several years around this time, AIP-TV also distributed several British TV series, including The Avengers, to U.S. stations.

In 1969 AIP went public to raise extra capital, issuing 300,000 shares.[22][23]

In 1970 they entered into an agreement with Commonwealth United Productions to issue their films.[24] In 1971 they released 31 films, their greatest number to date, and were seen as one of the most stable companies in Hollywood.[25] Despite their exploitation roots they did not concentrate on X or R rated filmmaking during this period.[26]

Arkoff continued on at AIP as president until the end of the decade. Heads of production during the 1970s included Larry Gordon[31] and Jere Henshaw.

By the early 1970s AIP felt the horror movie cycle was in decline, and so switched to other genres, such as kung fu and gangsters.[32] Notably they produced some of that decade's blaxploitation films like Blacula, and Foxy Brown. In a throwback to the old "studio days", the company is credited with making Pam Grier a household name, as the majority of her early '70s films were made under contract to American International.

By the late 1970s costs of making movies continued to rise, AIP's tactic of moving into bigger budgeted quality pictures was not paying off at the box office, and Arkoff began to think of merging the company. "We've been the Woolworths of the movie business but Woolworths is being out priced," said Arkoff.[35] Talks began with Filmways Incorporated. Negotiations stalled for a while[36] but resumed a number of months later.[37] In 1979 AIP was sold to Filmways, Inc. for $30 million and became a subsidiary production unit thereof renamed Filmways Pictures in 1980.[38][39]

Arkoff was unhappy with the direction of the company and resigned to set up his own production company, receiving a pay out worth $1.4 million.[40][41]

AIP-TV was absorbed as the wholly owned program syndication arm of Filmways Television. Filmways was later bought by Orion Pictures Company in 1982 and Filmways was later renamed to Orion Pictures Corporation, but retained the distribution arm. This allowed Orion to establish its own distribution after utilizing Warner Bros. for distribution which still has distribution rights to Orion films Warner distributed. Today, a majority of the AIP library is owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's subsidiary Orion Pictures Corporation. The American International name is still a registered trademark owned by MGM's Orion Pictures unit.[42][43]

^American International Pictures' Profit Steady: Company Says Results for Third Fiscal Quarter Were About the Same as for Year-Ago Period Wall Street Journal (1923 - Current file) [New York, N.Y] 12 Oct 1971: 37.